Noticing

Your brain is always being shaped by something, and if you're not deliberately shaping it, something else already is. That's neurology. The same plasticity that shows up as a larger hippocampus in London cab drivers responds to demand in either direction. When the demand changes, the brain changes with it. 

I met a version of this in person on a recent trip to New York, an Uber driver who told me he'd had to learn thousands of streets, avenues and boulevards to pass his own licensing exam. You must score an 80 or you fail. He's probably working with a larger hippo too. The organ doesn't consult you before it remodels. It just measures repetition. Whatever you repeat, you become. Whatever you neglect, you lose, usually with little fanfare.

Norwegian conscription data shows IQ scores reversing since about 1975, reversing even between brothers raised in the same house, which strongly points away from genetics and toward environmental causes. MIT's study of 126,000 news cascades on X (it's still Twitter to me), revealed false or fake stories outrun true ones because novelty is what a feed rewards and a lie can always be built to spec while a truth has to actually occur. This is not fake news. Something is happening to sustained human attention, and it's happening fast enough to show up in a single generation.

This comes to me via YouTube, itself a big player in The Complex. This content enters my feed as guided by an algorithm that understands what I usually like to watch. You can learn a lot this way.

Watching that video is not the practice. It's still consumption. Thirty minutes of well-sourced alarm about the collapse of attention, delivered through the exact medium that collapses attention, changes nothing in you by itself. You can nod along, feel briefly sharpened, and close the tab having done nothing but confirm what you already suspected. Watching something is not the same as doing it. That involves self-cultivation.

What actually counts as the practice is catching the pattern live, in yourself, while it's happening. Noticing the reach for the phone mid-paragraph before you've decided to reach for it. Noticing the three-times-reread sentence and recognizing it for what it is, a remodel in progress rather than simple fatigue. That noticing is worth more than the video that prompted it, because the video only describes the mechanism. Catching it in yourself is the mechanism responding to being caught.

I finished Intruder in the Dust not long ago and it's a decent example of what I mean, mostly because I had trouble getting into it. Faulkner opens with a narration that won't resolve. Third person, but also "he," and for a long stretch it isn't clear who "he" is. I got about 30 pages in and knew exactly what was happening, but who this "he" was just didn't register with me. Faulkner rarely names anyone directly, you have to pick up what people are called by someone else saying their name or whatever.

My first instinct was to let it wash over me and keep going, or just put it down. That got me through Ulysses years ago. Instead I stopped and reread those first pages again. Turned out the "he" was a 16-year-old boy who ends up tangled in a murder investigation. Once that clicked, the “he” of the book opened up. It was more entertaining than I expected, which is really the point.

But Faulkner buries the characters and the plot on purpose. Who's related to whom, what somebody actually meant by an offhand remark, it's all sitting in the middle of long stream-of-consciousness passages that seem to have nothing to do with the story at all. Skim it, the way you often skim life, and you get confusion. Hold it, the way nobody trains you to anymore, and the confusion resolves into something genuinely good.

That's a small, ruleless practice. There's no method to it beyond focus on this book, this one, all the way through, without switching away from it. But notice what kind of entertainment that produces. It's a different animal entirely from The Complex's entertainment. No call to action. Nothing pulling you toward the next thing. Certainly not convenient, since it demanded a brief re-read before it would reveal anything at all.

The Complex bundles entertainment with consumption and convenience as a structural default, that's what makes it The Complex. Take away consumption and convenience and what's left is just the encounter itself, a mind meeting another mind across a span of years, with nothing mediating it but the attention you brought. You can't get that faster. There's no version of Faulkner made more convenient that keeps the thing intact. Summarize it and you get plot. The book itself only exists on the far side of the attention it demands. In absolutely exquisite prose.

None of this requires a doctrine. It doesn't require sitting a certain way or reading a canon someone else approved. It requires noticing what's happening to your own attention in real time, and every so often, picking something difficult and refusing to let your focus fragment away from it. If you want the fuller case for why your attention evolved for a world that no longer exists, I've written about that at more length here. The practice itself is smaller than any essay, including that one, including this one.

Catch yourself being aware mid-drift. It doesn't solve the world for you but it makes you more understandable to yourself.